How to Optimize Your Best Shopping Carts

Optimizing the best shopping carts is, at times, more challenging than optimizing a landing page. This is the stage where the buyer is at the peak of his buying interests while at the same time at the height of apprehensions, especially if the products are quite expensive. It is important that the cart provides an easy way out to complete the sales cycle; otherwise, prospected buyers will be deterred from pushing the shopping cart further all the way down to the finishing line.

The shopping cart is widely neglected by many marketers, and yet it is one of the most critical areas of the buying process that can make or break the transaction. For most sellers, once the carts are installed, they don’t bother checking the cart anymore. Conversion is largely dependent on the landing page, notwithstanding that the cart its influence in buyers’ decision to pursue the purchase or not.

In one experiment done by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin about Shopping cart conversion rate, doing a couple of tweaks on the shopping cart dramatically increased the conversion rate by about 12%. So it is clear that shopping carts do matter a lot in conversion; it has impact on abandonment rate as well. This makes it all the more important to check the cart regularly in order to keep it abreast with the present customer behavior that normally changes from time-to-time.

Vital Tweaks on Your Best Shopping Carts that Increase Conversion

Design

This is perhaps the most critical component of the cart, and it sums up everything from white space, color combination, delineation of various checkout steps, and images among others.

Color Mix -Color combination can be tweaked oftentimes in order to determine the perfect mixture that appeals to the buyers’ psychological purchasing behavior. If your brand has a distinct color theme, then it must be aligned with the brand color image as well.

For instance, Amazon has a brand image color mix of golden yellow, white, and black. Consequently, its shopping carts have golden yellow button colors with black font amidst a white backdrop. There is alignment of colors in the cart and its brand logo, so people are at ease shopping with a feeling of securing on doing the transaction in an authentic Amazon store.

If the carts have totally different colors then consumers will begin to doubt if they are truly in a genuine Amazon website or not. Many shoppers will have this kind of thinking, so make sure that the color is aligned with your brand image or logo.

Process Delineation – Consumers will have a hard time processing their buying thoughts if your checkout page is not properly organized. But if you group them accordingly, it will be easier for the customers to understand the entire buying procedure. Therefore, don’t create a cart-page that has everything in a single page; rather, add partitions or breadcrumbs so that it is easy for the customers to navigate through the checkout process.

It’s like a house; it is more comfortable and relaxing to live in a home that is well-partitioned that separates the bedroom, the dining area, the bathroom, and the living quarters from the other rooms, right?

Breadcrumbs help users to know where they are and what places they would like to go next. This can be presented in hierarchical manner to easily distinguish the different steps of buying. Having efficient process delineation can also enhance the user-experience of the checkout process, thereby promoting better conversion rate.

Add Reviews

If your shopping cart doesn’t have feedbacks from existing clients, then add a few positive reviews to further reinforce the buyers’ confidence. Reviews from existing customers can dramatically boost the confidence of the prospects.

In the same experiment conducted by Dr. Flint above, one of the tweaks made that resulted to 12% increase in conversion rate was adding reviews. It concluded that reviews add and maintain the momentum of the customers, further motivating them to push the carts up to the finish line.

 

The above experiment is reinforced by a joint study made by CompUSA and iPerceptions that showed that about 63% of buyers signified that why will buy products from web stores with product reviews and ratings. So if you miss out this one in your cart then start adding them and you should see positive changes ahead in your sales.

It is also important to regularly update the review. Repeat buyers will soon observe the freshness of the review. If they keep on seeing the same reviews for several weeks, then that would diminish their confidence to make another purchase. So be honest in placing the feedbacks of real customers. Better yet, publish the latest review or rank them according to date of posting from latest to the oldest comment.

Add a Secondary Call-to-Action

Most shopping carts have only one call-to-action statement that is focused on the buying customers. You can make your shopping unique by adding a secondary call-to-action statement. Bear in mind that there are two major types of buyers filling out the carts. One group is composed of buyers, while another group consists of non-buyers.

The non-buyers are those who are just filling out the cart with the intent of buying them in the future, while the rest are simply enjoying window shopping online with no intention to buy. But just because these are non-buyers, you will not give them due attention. Don’t make this mistake.

The fact that they are window shopping or doing advance shopping in your online shop this already signals their interest in your products. With just a little push on these prospects, they will eventually buy some of your products or come back in the future to complete their purchase. You can push them by inserting a secondary call-to-action phrase targeting this segment.

This can be a statement asking prospected buyers to save and park the shopping cart for future use, along with scheduled alerts to their emails reminding them to update the cart. You can also ask them to subscribe to your discount alerts so that they will be among the first to be informed when one or more of the products that they put in the cart are on bargain sale or offered at greatly-discounted price.

An Infographic posted in Bizelo blog about Shopping cart abandonment rate showed that 25% of the shoppers abandoned their carts due to high price. So if you will be offering discounts in the future, these people will probably have no more hesitation to buy your products. One way of informing them about your future discounts is to ask them in your secondary call-to-action statement to subscribe to your newsletter or discount-alerts. This is ideal not only for buyers but for the non-buyers as well.

Guarantee Statement

Another aspect where you can tweak is the guarantee statement. Adding 30-day to 90-day guarantee can further boost the conversion. Carts with no money-back guarantee are naturally encountering higher abandonment rate compared to those with guarantee statement. So add one in your cart to increase the conversion.

There is, however, a challenge when inserting a guarantee. It’s hard to determine which number of days is better. You can opt to give 30-days, 60-days, 90-days, one-year, or even a lifetime guarantee. Which of them to choose depends on the type of product you are offering; therefore, split-test on this aspect to find out the ideal term.

There are still more areas of the best shopping carts to tweak, but you should already see some dramatic changes or an increase in conversion rate from your well targeted website visitors. To get closer to success, you should learn more about how to optimize your best shopping carts aside from the methods discussed above.